The House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee has asked the UK government to commit to introducing a new Environmental Protection Bill before the triggering of Article 50 which would transpose, strengthen or protect environmental regulation in the UK, 80 per cent of which is estimated to be founded in EU law.

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MPs on the committee - chaired by Labour’s Mary Creagh and including nine Conservative MPs - want the government to ensure that the UK has an “equivalent or better level of environmental protection as the EU”. MPs expressed “scepticism” over DEFRA’s ability to meet the additional administrative pressures it will face after the UK exits the EU. Significantly, the Committee wants the Government to identify legislation which may be difficult to transpose in UK law, to ensure full public and parliamentary debate and scrutiny. And it wants all this to happen before Article 50 is triggered, which the Prime Minister has said she is aiming to do by the end of March this year. Finally, the Committee wants a government guarantee “that it will not trade away environmental protections, animal welfare and food safety standards, as part of the negotiations to leave, or as part of future trade deals”. The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy provides £3.5bn a year in subsidies to UK farmers, making up more than half of their income, and the MPs said Brexit posed a “triple jeopardy” for farmers.

The government is obliged to respond to the Committee’s report within the current parliamentary session and ministers may be invited to give evidence again before it. The Committee’s report is only the first in what are likely to be a number of interventions from MPs calling for negotiation objectives in specific policy areas to be set out to parliament before the triggering of Article 50. With the UK Supreme Court decision still pending, MPs may well still get the chance to add parliamentary conditions to the triggering of Article 50. Theresa May has stated her intention to present more detailed steps to parliament “in the coming weeks”.

2017 will be an important time to engage parliamentarians on specific issues relating to Brexit, both before and after the start of formal negotiations.You can read the and download the Committee’s full report here.